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The Return of the Slumlord: a Note on Some Recent Cases in Sweden

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The Return of the Slumlord: a Note on Some Recent Cases in Sweden The return of the Swedish slumlord: Analysis of a recent case Gunnar Blomé Malmö University, Department of Urban Studies, P.O. Box 205 06, Malmö Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real estate and Constructive management, Stockholm Email: [email protected] Hans Lind Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Stockholm Email: [email protected] Abstract Purpose: The article tries to explain how long-term mismanagement of a housing estate could arise in a country with a strong legal framework aimed at preventing such situations. Approach: Assuming that both tenants and landlord are rational, the article presents a set of hypotheses that is consistent with the information available. Findings: It is argued that the tenants stayed even though the rent was higher and the quality was lower than in neighboring areas because of a combination of three factors: Rents was paid by different forms of welfare payments, lack of alternatives because of queues to other areas and because some tenants saw an advantage in the “no-question“ asked policy that the slumlord followed. It is further argued that the property owner found this slum-strategy as profitable either because the hoped to find a “bigger fool” to sell to and because the decision makers in the company had not invested their own money. Both tenants and investors were in the end losers, but not the company managers. Practical and social implications: The Swedish legal framework is to a large extent based on the idea that tenants should take action when there are problems. For several reasons the tenants in the area did not do that and it indicates that a more active role for the local authorities is necessary. Originality: The article focus on an interesting case that most people thought could not occur and tries to explain this within a framework of rational actors. Keywords: slumlord, rental housing, neglected maintenance, speculative investors 1 1. Introduction 1.1 Background Housing quality in Sweden is very high by international standards. Municipal housing companies with a broad tenant base are the dominating landlord in the rental housing stock. In order to buy a property with rental apartment you have needed a permit from the municipality. There are laws saying that buildings must be maintained and a law about “receivership” which means that the tenants can deposit their rent at a public authority and go to court if the owner mismanages the property.1 The court can then appoint a management company that takes care of the property for a specific time, and the management company is paid from the deposited rents. Typically this has happened for small properties owned by single persons or small companies, and there have only been a few cases per year in the whole country. Sweden also has a strong tenant´s union that together with the strong legislative framework should guarantee that everyone lives in an apartment with good quality and that the property is taken care of in a professional way. It therefore came as a surprise to most people in 2008 when a TV-program known for unraveling scandals described the condition in a large housing estate in Malmö (part of an area called Herrgården).2The program showed an estate with bathrooms full of mold, and with cockroaches and lice in overcrowded apartments. The hallways were full of graffiti and had many broken windows. Outside there was a lot of litter and garbage. The owner had obviously reduced maintenance expenditure to almost zero in order to maximize the net operating income. In the Swedish context this is called a slum area. 1.2 Purpose and method The basic purpose of this article is to discuss how this could happen. What mechanism can have led to this condition that the general public, authorities and politicians thought could not arise in Sweden? From the beginning we want to underline that this is a speculative article. For reasons that will be clear later it is almost impossible to collect evidence that could substantiate some of the hypotheses more definitely. The method used can be seen as type of hypothetical-deductive method in the spirit of Karl Popper (see e.g. Popper 1963). The analysis starts with the surprising observation of large scale slum in modern areas in Sweden. With a theoretical background in economics a number of possible explanations - conjectures - were formulated within the framework of utility maximizing individuals and pareto-optimality. These theories were then confronted with all the empirical evidence we could get hold on with a reasonable amount of resources to see if there were any information that could refute these conjectures. 1 The law was recently changed but that was after the events analyzed in this article. 2 That there were problems in the areas was however described in several studies already during the 1990s, see e.g.Ristalammi (1994), Popoola (1998,1999). This information did not however lead to any strong reactions and broader debates on housing policy, probably because the scale of the problems was smaller then compared to 2008.. 2 One of us has been studying a similar nearby area that the municipal housing company MKB bought in 2006 and has also worked in the field in that area. This experience and contacts built up during that work has also been used to collect further information. The article could also be described as an attempt to put together a puzzle with a rather small number of pieces available. It is therefore more of a starting point for further work than something close to the final explanation of how large slums could arise in Sweden. The structure of the article is as follows. In section 2 the area and its history is described. Section 3 presents some general theories of slums that we will argue are not so relevant in the case under study. In section 4 our hypotheses and the relevant evidence is presented and at the end of that section there is an attempt to present a coherent picture that is consistent both with an hypothesis about rationality and with the available evidence. A final discussion including some policy lessons can be found in the last section. 2. Description of the area and its history 2.1 The housing district Rosengård Herrgården is a part of a district called Rosengård. Most areas in Rosengård were constructed during 1965 to 1971, a part of the so called Million Homes Program in Sweden. Even though it is located rather close to the city center it never became an attractive area. The district has a population of around 22 000 and a large percentage of these are characterized as socio- economic disadvantaged households. In the 1980s and the 1990s many ethnic Swedes moved out from Rosengård which instead became a home for many newly arrived refugees transforming the area’s population from homogeneous to more heterogeneous (see Molina, 2001). Many residents live their life in unemployment, dependent on public welfare, feeling that they were not a part of the Swedish society. Since the 1980s, various government- subsidized projects were carried out to improve housing qualities with a special focus on the outdoor environment. In the 1990s, field-related projects instead focused more on social projects but still many problems remained (Bevelander et al., 2000, 2001). This is the general picture but actually there are large differences within the district of Rosengård. Rosengård includes seven neighbourhoods which differ in type of tenure and social composition (see map in Figure 1). Apelgården and Kryddgården in the north consist mostly of tenant-owned cooperative housing ("Bostadsrätt"), which is a form of condominiums. Västra Kattarp in the south only has owner-occupied single family houses. Persborg, Örtagård, Törnrosen and Herrgården only consist of rental properties which mark out an invisible boundary between these and the other neighborhoods in terms of socio economic situation (see e.g. Hallin et al., 2010 for more information about the general situation). Particularly, Örtagård and Törnrosen are similar to Herrgården regarding geographic location, construction year, social situation, demography and household- and apartment size. These neighborhoods, managed by the municipal housing company MKB, were previously more problematic but are today considered to be rather well functioning large housing estates in opposite to the most problematic part Herrgården which is in focus in this article.3 3 Malmö statistics (2009). 3 Figur 1: Map of Rosengård, Rosengård, with Herrgården located in the east. 2.2 The neighbourhood Herrgården Herrgården is located in the east of Rosengård next to the service center and surrounded by main roads in the north and east and the neighbourhood Västra Kattarp in the south. It was completed in the year 1967 and consists of 1360 apartments. It was then considered to be the best part of Rosengård. However, economic crisis in the beginning of the 1990s affected the neighbourhood negatively (Popoola, 1999) and a downward spiral started, probably because the area already then was managed less well than the areas owned the municipal housing company MKB. Socially stronger households were moving out and refugees and unemployed households moving in and the area are today portrayed as Malmö’s poorest overcrowded neighbourhood (Hallin, 2010). Herrgården is associated with segregation, poverty, social exclusion, poor mental health, vandalism, riots, fires, drugs and criminality and has become a prime example of a non-functioning neighbourhood. This is of course not the whole truth and some parts are functioning better than others. Herrgården has a significant concentration of people coming from other countries and 96 percent have other origin than Swedish if both first and second generation is counted.
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